October 7, 2014, OpEdNews All Systems Go: The Elite View of the New Iraq-Syria War   By Chris Floyd The vicious civil war we have fomented in Syria has spawned an extremist militia that is using the weapons we poured into Syria to attack the corrupt sectarian regime we installed in Iraq with our illegal invasion there earlier, which gave rise to a vicious civil war that has continued to this day, with both sides using our weapons. Cross-posted from Empire Burlesque And so a new war has begun. Or rather, a new front is opened (and an old one re-opened) in an ongoing, ever-expanding war. For the new war is of course our old friend, the War on Terror. (Although it should more accurately be termed "the War on Terror Spawned by the War on Terror.") The casus belli being offered up seem even more specious and shifting than usual. The vicious civil war we have fomented in Syria has spawned an extremist militia that is using the weapons we poured into Syria to attack the corrupt sectarian regime we installed in Iraq with our illegal invasion there earlier, which gave rise to a vicious civil war that has continued to this day, with both sides using our weapons. But is "war" really the right word? "War" implies a discrete event; it has a beginning, some kind of trajectory, some kind of an end. But the fiery miasma of slaughter and profiteering that is the Terror War has no such form. It has no trajectory -- and no end, as we have been told over and over by our bipartisan Terror Barons. For the imperial American state (and its various satellites, servants and satraps), the Terror War has become a state of nature -- even THE state of nature. It is no longer an event in reality; it is the very form of reality itself. It must go on because it can't NOT go on. To our ruling classes, and their lackeys and abettors and worshippers across the commanding heights of Western society, the very idea of any alternative to ceaseless conflict is unimaginable ... Hey, it's what we do. It's what we are. As our latest temporary manager, Obama, said the other day, it's how we roll. We exist solely to assert our dominance by violent force anywhere and anyhow we see fit. It is in blood and domination that we live and move and have our being. It doesn't matter in the end who we are fighting against, or with, or if we change partners in the middle of the battle. It doesn't matter if we fight an enemy here and arm him over there, or if our allies share the same extremism we are ostensibly trying to quell. It doesn't matter what we say to justify the killing and profiteering we want to do, or that we change these justifications from day to day, even from hour to hour. And it certainly doesn't matter what "legal" basis we offer for our lawless and arbitrary actions. We are more than happy to spout some meaningless jargon, to torture and degrade the language, to openly mock the very notion of reason and law -- as long as it keeps the editorial writers and think-tank quacks happy in their shallow fantasies of "serious" policy, as long as the public in whose name we are destabilizing and devouring the earth (including their own decaying communities) can keep believing that what we are doing with our killing and looting is keeping them safe from "psychopaths" and demonic beasts. As long as they can keep believing that they are being governed by a benevolent elite, whose ultimate aim -- however badly and ineptly they sometimes pursue it -- is to secure peace, freedom and prosperity for their own people, and for the world. And thus we watch with wry bemusement how earnestly the opinion-makers and commentators -- especially on the liberal side -- debate the "issues" around our brutal and arbitrary actions (which they, sweet naifs, call "policies"). How they puzzle and puzzle til their puzzlers are sore, to make our policies better. "Oh, if only we could make our leaders see that their policies are counterproductive, that they are failing to produce the outcomes they are seeking. Oh, if only our leaders could be smarter, cleverer, more insightful -- like us! But they just keep making the same mistakes, with the same bad outcomes, which just makes it harder for them to achieve their noble goals..." It's even more amusing when they get all scornful and sarcastic, when they smirk about what incompetent fools our elites are, how they're so stupid that they can't even see that they're shooting ourselves in the foot over and over, how they couldn't find their own ass with both hands even if both hands were stapled to their ass. (Was that Maher? Stewart? One of those media millionaires with the cutesy, soundbite smarm that passes for "dissent.") We love these guys. We watch their shows. We pass around their best lines at the conference table. You can't buy that kind of propaganda, that kind of reinforcement for the status quo. No one believes more in the system than these savvy snarkmasters. "The people in power now simply don't know how to achieve their goals. They're ruining the system! We need to get some better people in office to run the system. Then things will be all right." But of course the truth is that the system works very well. It does what it intends to do, and pursues its goals with admirable, ruthless efficiency. Nothing deters the system: not facts, not law, not truth, not consequences, not appeals to reason or conscience, not concern for future -- and certainly not snark from the chattering classes. The system can't "fail" in its goals, because there are no "goals," no endpoints. There is only the process -- the endless, churning process of violent domination, and the power and profits this produces for those who join (or are born to) the elite. If one front in the Terror War produces what our naifs call a "policy failure" -- the invasion of Iraq, say -- so what? You just keep churning and fighting and profiteering on a dozen other fronts, while your "policy failure" ripens into a catastrophic societal breakdown, producing more excuses to "step back in" and resume the conflict there again. So where is the "failure"? The violent, profitable process of empire -- the shark that must keep eating or else it dies -- has not skipped a beat. It just keeps expanding its range -- and, as in Iraq now, it can always come back to an old killing field. As long as the system keeps killing and grinding and churning, it can't fail, whatever may happen on this or that patch of ground at any particular time. The process -- not the seriously analyzed "outcome" of an operation -- is the whole point. There must be blood, there must be loot, there must be expansion. When you've killed all the Indians, you go kill the gooks. If the Commies quit the field, you kill Muslims instead. This is what the system is. This is what the system does. And whoever seeks to control the system -- whoever fights and claws their way into the cockpit of this monstrous machine, to give themselves and their courtiers a few years at the wheel -- is a willing, eager part of the system. For example, there is now a great deal of liberal handwringing about the "tragedy" of Barack Obama being "sucked back" into the morass of Iraq. "He wanted change, he wanted to lead us away from this kind of thing, but now look! Despite his best intentions, here we are again." In most of these cases, Obama's predecessor gets the blame -- "Bush made a mess of Iraq, and now Obama has to clean it up." (I don't recall seeing any commentary along these lines noting that Bill Clinton -- the husband of the next president of the United States -- also did yeoman service in making a mess of Iraq, having killed some 500,000 children with his pointless, punitive sanctions. He killed those children because Saddam wouldn't give up his WMD -- you know, the WMD he didn't have. Oh, how we rightfully scorned Bush for "going to war over false pretenses" about that phantom WMD; but the good old Big Dawg killed half a million children for the same knowing lie, and left Iraqi society in chaos.) Anyway, we are now told that thanks to Bush, Obama is between a rock and a hard place, trying his dee-diddly-darndest to deal with those extremist beheaders of ISIS (with the help of the extremist beheaders of Saudi Arabia) without putting "boots on the ground." He wanted to change the system -- but it looks like the "Deep State" was too much for him. What a tragedy for him -- and for us. Can we dispense briefly but decisively with this oleaginous bullshit by making a single observation? A man who hand-picked George Bush's Secretary of Defense to serve as his own Master of War knew exactly what the system is -- and did not have the slightest intention of changing it. In fact, Obama has been phenomenally successful in expanding the system of violence and domination, extending it new areas, with new tools (Oval Office death squads! Assassinating innocent teenagers!) -- and bringing it all back home with hi-tech surveillance, whistleblower persecution and journalist prosecutions his predecessor could only dream of. And so we are at war again. But we are never not at war anymore. That's what we do. That's what we are. Submitters Bio: Chris Floyd is an American journalist. His work has appeared in print and online in venues all over the world, including The Nation, Counterpunch, Columbia Journalism Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Il Manifesto, the Moscow Times and many others. He is the author of Empire Burlesque: High Crimes and Low Comedy in the Bush Imperium, and is co-founder and editor of the "Empire Burlesque" political blog.